Trucking Mobilecom Pioneer Jacobs Will Retire as Qualcomm CEO, to Be Replaced by Son

Qualcomm Inc. has named Paul E. Jacobs as chief executive officer. Jacobs is the son of company co-founder Irwin Mark Jacobs.

Paul Jacobs, 42, will assume the post and join the board July 1. Irwin Jacobs, 71, will remain as chairman.
This will be the second retirement for Jacobs, who retired the first time in 1985. He stayed retired only three months. Jacobs and partners founded Qualcomm in July of 1985 and went on to develop the two-way, mobile, satellite communications systems that became OmniTRACS.
Jacobs spoke with Heavy Duty Trucking in 1997, the 10th anniversary of Qualcomm’s successful relationship with Schneider International, the fleet that bought Qualcomm’s first mobile communications system and made it work. One issue that concerned him at the time was driver acceptance.
“It never developed into a problem in the sense that as drivers began to use the system there were enough positive rewards. You arrive someplace you could sleep, you didn't have to wake up every hour to find out where you're going to go next. The system would remember it. And if you were really needed, you could be beeped.
“You would be spending more time carrying loads and therefore the whole operation would be more profitable, and part of those profits were shared with the drivers. I think the number of these factors turned out to outweigh the negatives of this Big Brother issue,” Irwin said. (For the entire interview about the dawn of wireless technology in the trucking industry, see the April issue of Heavy Duty Trucking.)
The promotions, approved by the board of directors and announced this week, included the appointment of Steven Altman, 43, to succeed Tony Thornley as Qualcomm president. Thornley, 58, will also retire on July 1.
Marc Stern, a Qualcomm director and head of the board's governance committee, said the company began searching for a successor in early 2002. It wanted to promote someone within in an effort to preserve the company's culture and to ensure that Irwin Jacobs remained "engaged and influential."
The company never interviewed anyone outside Qualcomm, Stern said. Several internal candidates he declined to name were considered for chief executive before the nod went to Paul Jacobs, an electrical engineer and computer scientist who joined the company in 1990.
Paul Jacobs, who has headed the company's wireless and Internet division since 2001, has held a variety of jobs at Qualcomm and played a key role in the sale of the company's handset business to Kyocera Wireless Corp. in 2000.
Paul Jacobs said he wasn't planning any big makeovers.
"I wouldn't expect to see great changes in the strategy of this company," he told reporters. "The strategy that we're on is working incredibly well."
For more information, visit www.qualcomm.com.